Eugenie Bouchard won her second-round match Wednesday morning at the French Open, beating Belgium’s Julia Goerges in three sets.

Court 7, where the match took place, is a lovely mini-stadium, with a few hundred seats, none more than about 25 feet from the court. And if you were lucky enough to be there, you were indeed lucky, because at the rate Bouchard is going — finishing 2012 ranked 144th in the world, finishing 2013 ranked 32nd, now sitting at 16th — it won’t be long before she’s playing in 15,000-seat Philippe Chatrier.

At the same time Bouchard was winning on the smaller court, American falling-star Venus Williams was losing to unheralded 56th-ranked Anna Schmiedlova — on Chatrier.

Well now, that’s interesting if you’re a Canadian tennis fan, because it was less than four years ago that Venus had her hands full with another Canadian. My wife and I were on our way to New York for a long-planned U.S. Open bucket-list trip, flying overnight, when we realized that, just hours later, Vancouver’s Rebecca Marino — an up-and-comer who’d made the main draw of the 2010 tournament through qualifying — was to play Venus at Arthur Ashe Stadium. We arrived in the city around 8 a.m., dropped our bags off at the hotel, freshened up after flying the red-eye, and made our way out to Queens for the match, played in the early afternoon on a scorching day.

Marino was brilliant, in places, that day. She gave it her all in that opening set, nearly overwhelming the third seed, a seven-time Grand Slam singles champion, with her power. Sitting high in the upper deck, we were pumped. We believed we were witnessing the birth of a Canadian champion, chanted her name. (A year later, I met Marino’s dad in Vancouver, told him about being at the match. “I thought I heard you guys,” he said.) But Marino lost that set, in a tiebreaker. And Venus, who could still conjure magic 14 years after her WTA debut, won a lopsided second set to take the match.

Things were never really the same for Marino. At least, it seemed like she reached the height of her tennis career that day, and was never again able to match it. Bouchard, on the other hand, is into the third round — ironically, that was Marino’s Grand Slam-best result just eight months after we saw her in New York — and she’ll be heavily favoured over world No. 99 Johanna Larsson of Sweden. From there, a potential fourth-round match against German eighth-seed Angelique Kerber. She’s also an impressive 20-year-old, which you can see from this interview she gave in Australia last December:

Here’s the rest of the 2 O’Clock:

NOT TO TORTS’ LIKING. BUT TORTS ISN’T IN THE PLAYOFFS

Trending like mad on Twitter? Dale Weise.

Yes, the former Vancouver Canuck, so unrecognized on the West Coast that he could ride down the elevator in his building, with Canucks fans in jerseys talking hockey and not thinking twice about the big guy riding with him, can’t go anywhere in Montreal without being hailed as a hero.

Then, on Tuesday night, during Game 5, Weise was breathtaking. In 11:21 of action — only two Habs forwards had less ice time than Weise — he had two assists, four hits and was rocked off his feet by a cheap, high hit by the New York Rangers’ John Moore (who awaits the results of a hearing with the NHL’s discipline department).

Stunning, frankly, that Rangers head coach Alain Vigneault would say today that Weise was “admiring his pass” when Moore hit him. After all, Moore hit Weise, according to the CBC, about 9/10 of a second after the pass. Is it possible Weise was just doing what anyone would do? Look to see where the pass is going?

Weise should admire his passing. Check out his two assists, at approximately the two-minute mark and again at 2:15:

And so Weise is trending. And here’s a sampling:

Words of advice for Alain Vigneault: Shut up, don't poke the bear. Weise made the Bruins pay last series, let's see him make you pay. #habs

Frankly, the experiment borders on mesmerizing. Seriously. Throughout the match, you can see that Twitter users who follow soccer are prolific in countries such as Spain, Portugal, England, Brazil, Mexico, throughout Central America, in many parts of the U.S. and in Canada’s urban centres (though mainly Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal), Indonesia, Italy, Turkey, Ivory Coast, Nigeria, and the northwest countries of South America — Ecuador, Colombia and Venezuela. In all of those places, there was pretty constant Twitter chatter throughout the two-and-a-half-hour match.

But there are certain moments where Twitter explodes globally — where, literally, people go nuts. Not so much when Atletico’s Diego Godin put his team ahead in the first half, but more so when Sergio Ramos scored the tying goal, and again when Gareth Bale scored the go-ahead goal in extra time.

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